The Curse of Eelgrass Bog by Mary Averling

Blurb:

Dark secrets and unnatural magic abound when a twelve-year-old girl ventures into a bog full of monsters to break a mysterious curse.

Nothing about Kess Pedrock’s life is normal. Not her home (she lives in her family’s Unnatural History Museum), not her interests (hunting for megafauna fossils and skeletons), and not her best friend (a talking demon’s head in a jar named Shrunken Jim).

But things get even stranger than usual when Kess meets Lilou Starling, the new girl in town. Lilou comes to Kess for help breaking a mysterious curse—and the only clue she has leads straight into the center of Eelgrass Bog.

Everyone knows the bog is full of witches, demons, and possibly worse, but Kess and Lilou are determined not to let that stop them. As they investigate the mystery and uncover long-buried secrets, Kess begins to realize that the curse might hit closer to home than she’d ever expected, and she’ll have to summon all her courage to find a way to break it before it’s too late.

Review:

"Maybe they never will. But I reckon the best families aren’t perfect anyway.”

―Mary Averling, The Curse Of Eelgrass Bog

In The Curse Of Eelgrass Bog by Mary Averling, Kess (Kester) is the lone caretaker of the abandoned and unvisited Museum Of Unnatural History—her, and her mean, selfish brother who’s isolated himself in one of the back rooms of the rotting building. Tasked with repairing and defending the building until her parents return from their expedition to Antarctica to recover unique and extraordinary bones, she’s falling behind on tending the constant needs and keeping at bay deterioration of the museum. When she meets a girl named Lilou who promises to help her restore her museum if Kess helps her solve the mystery her grandfather left to her about a curse, a secret society, and the bog that surrounds the town they live in as well as the Unnatural History Museum, Kess will do anything to unravel the truth Lilou seeks. Even if it means discovering secrets that she’ll regret learning…and unveiling a history she might’ve preferred to forget.

This is my first read of a book written by Mary Averling, but The Curse Of Eelgrass Bog has been on my to-be-read list since before the book was published. Following Averling on social media, I read up on all her posts about her debut middle grade horror novel, The Curse Of Eelgrass Bog, which I have since confirmed is a fresh and intriguing take on middle grade fiction in the areas of horror. This book is short and smart, with gut-wrenching revelations, stomach-punching plot twists, and a small cast of characters that would tug at the most resilient readers’ heartstrings.

I absolutely loved the mysteries set up throughout the narrative, and how everything mentioned early on in the story comes into play later on in the book. Every promised plot thread is paid off by the end, and each of the mysteries presented at the start of the story are unraveled in a sly and satisfying way.

The Curse Of Eelgrass Bog is a book I wish I would’ve been able to read as a younger kid, when I would’ve been so obsessed about it that I would’ve told all my friends about it until they begged me to stop talking. Eerie and dark, this story is one that will stick with readers, especially early readers who hope to dive into new genres and expand their reading pallets.

I love the way Averling handles prose in this story. Nothing is over-explained or dragged to death. While there are difficult words, they’re presented in such a way as to enlighten and broaden the minds of early readers who are expanding their vocabulary as they transition into reading more difficult novels and books written for older audiences.

Averling has a phenomenal handle on introducing difficult subjects in children’s fiction, approaching the concepts of grief, memory, and sadness with a tentative and intelligent hand that will prepare readers for a lifetime of novels brimming with impactful and meaningful themes. The messages of hope and recovery in this story were themes I’m used to seeing in accelerated levels of fiction, and reading those messages in a novel authored for early readers, in a clever and digestible way, gives me hope for the future of the reading community and the stories we will write and consume.

I’m thrilled to see where Averling goes next in her literary career. I’m definitely going to pick up her second publication—The Ghosts Of Bitterfly Bay—as soon as I’m able to. Mary Averling is a true, authentic voice in the middle grade horror genre, and I can see her books changing the world. If not the “whole” wide world, then the worlds of the readers, especially the young readers, who read and fall in love her novels. It’s definitely a story that’s worth the read, no matter your age!